"I'm miserable!"
On May 10 this year, Mr. Li, who lives in Fengxian District, Shanghai, went to the police station to report that he had lost 500,000 yuan in an online game, and it all started because he added a WeChat account for the anchor of the game guild "Tianyu".
After the police investigated, they found that Mr. Li's experience was not so simple. Since this report, an online gambling case worth more than 30 million yuan has surfaced.
Where did the player's 500,000 go?
The online game Mr. Li is talking about is "Demon Domain", which was in public beta in 2006. At that time, Mr. Li was still in junior high school, and he had a lot of fun fighting monsters and upgrading according to the settings in the game.
Because of this feeling, although Mr. Li doesn't play much anymore when he grows up, he has been paying attention to the update of the game through various channels. To this day, Demon Domain still has quite a few players.
In 2009, a new item "Soul of Alama was launched" in "Demon Domain". According to the game setting, this prop is divided into 18 levels, which can be embedded into the equipment, and the higher the level of the prop, the greater the improvement of the equipment attributes after inlay. High-level "Soul of Alama Spirit" can only be forged from the designated in-game currency "Magic Stone", and the probability of success is random, and if you fail, you will lose the corresponding item.
This setting makes high-level "Soul of Alama rare", and players gradually recognize that the value of high-level "Soul of Alama is several times or more than the magic stone consumed by forging". As a result, the high-level "Soul of Alama Soul" has become a new "currency" in the game, often used in transactions between players.
It was this forging process that first caught Mr. Lee's attention. While watching the live broadcast, he found that some game streamers specially used the game accounts of international servers to synthesize different levels of "Soul of Alama", and he enjoyed it.
If the matter ends here, it is just another live broadcast project similar to opening a blind box, how can Mr. Li invest as much as 500,000 yuan?
What are they betting on in the live broadcast room?
It turns out that some people have made the forging process a gambling game.
"Upper points" and "lower points" are the codes used between the streamer and the player who participate in gambling, and the former refers to the player's transfer of money from the anchor to buy "magic stones" of the same value. If the "Magic Stone" is successfully forged, the streamer will purchase the successfully forged "Soul of Alama Soul" according to the market price in the game, and after drawing 5 points, the remaining part will be converted into RMB and returned to the player, which is the "next point". If the upgrade fails, the player is left with nothing.
In this process, the player is the gambler, the anchor is equivalent to the dealer, and the "magic stone" is the chip that the gambler spends money to buy. If the forging in the live broadcast room is successful, it is equivalent to the gambler betting on the points, and he can get several times or even higher returns. If the forging fails, the bet is not won, and the gambler will lose all his money.
Because the probability of forging success or not is completely random, and the anchors can't grasp it. So, they will make sure that they don't lose money in two ways. One is to take 5 points as a profit when "playing the next point", and the other is to sell "magic stones" to players who participate in gambling. The official price of a "magic stone" is 200 yuan, and the anchors buy it for 185 yuan through other channels, and then sell it to players for 190 yuan.
In this way, regardless of whether the "magic stones" purchased by players can be successfully forged, the streamers can guarantee a certain profit.
Further investigation by the police found that in addition to Mr. Li's report, there are many clues on the Internet that also point to the guild called "Tianyu" in "Demon Domain", which will solicit gamblers in the game. From May to June this year, with the assistance of the local public security organs, the police arrested 13 criminal suspects, including Han, Zhuang, and Zhou, who belonged to different studios, from Shandong, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Guangxi, Fujian, and other places.
Is the dealer the top three players in the national server?
Yu is a veteran player of "Demon Domain", and he has been in contact with the game since 2006 and once reached the top three in the national server. Therefore, he is quite famous in the player circle, and he can make money by reselling equipment in the game, playing on behalf of others, etc.
In 2019, Yu officially founded the "Tianyu" guild in the game and served as its president. Yu himself mainly plays games through online live broadcasts, with the aim of attracting fans and making a name for the guild. Other anchors have rich live broadcast content, including "showing off skills" to fight monsters, as well as "magic stones" forging that is actually used for gambling.
According to Yu, he never took the initiative to recruit game anchors, but relied on his fame and appeal to attract them to join him, because the anchors themselves could not attract the attention of so many players.
These anchors all abide by the rules and models of "Magic Stone Forging" formulated by Yu, and they put their WeChat accounts on the public screen for live viewers to add freely, and after adding friends, they will first introduce the gameplay to customers.
Yu also established a "game exchange group" as a working group to discuss the "upper and lower points" of customers and turnover data, and from time to time remind anchors to often send red envelopes or send special products, etc., to maintain customer relationships.
Han is one of the anchors of the guild, and he is also a veteran player who started playing "Demon Domain" in 2013, and began to broadcast related content in 2020, but then suspended due to his wife's pregnancy and childbirth. In September 2022, he returned to his old business because he had no other source of income, but the customer flow was not ideal. Considering the audience of the live broadcast, he called his wife to live broadcast together, and later called his brother and daughter-in-law to take shifts, and he was responsible for summarizing the live broadcast income.
After auditing, the total gambling funds involved in the "Tianyu" guild amounted to more than 3,000 yuan, and Yu made 50% of the profits by extracting subordinate anchors, and made illegal profits of more than 60 yuan.
Is it a crime to be common in the gaming circle?
In August this year, the case was transferred to the Fengxian District People's Procuratorate in Shanghai for review and prosecution.
At first, there was some controversy as to whether the conduct of Yu and others constituted a crime. The defender believes that it is a common phenomenon in the gaming industry for game anchors to help customers train and forge equipment, and it is a commercial behavior for Yu and others to earn the price difference, which should not be found to be a crime.
In addition to the earlier "boosting" and "substitution", in recent years, there are indeed some players who think they are unlucky and will hand over their accounts to the anchor, who will carry out live broadcasts such as card drawing, forging and other behaviors that require luck, and there are many onlookers.
However, the prosecutor in charge pointed out that the anchors in this case logged in to their own game accounts during the live broadcast, and the forging results had nothing to do with the player's game role. In other words, the players in the live broadcast room are not here to level up or forge equipment.
The anchors provide "repurchase services" for participating players, so as to realize the two-way exchange of game currency and RMB, and use the price difference of magic stones to seek illegal benefits in the form of commissions, all of which are in line with the characteristics of gambling platforms.
After the Fengxian Procuratorate initiated a public prosecution, the Fengxian Court recently sentenced 13 defendants including Yu to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from 1 year and 8 months to 6 months for the crime of gambling and fined.
"In gambling cases, the gambler's behavior is also illegal, so the lost gambling funds will not be returned, but will be confiscated as illegal gains involved in the case." The undertaking prosecutor reminded.
What other gambling tricks are there?
By retrieving public reports, Jiefang Daily and Shangguan News reporters found that in recent years, there have been many cases of players using the game "Demon Domain" to gamble. A case reported by the People's Court Daily in 2023 is exactly the same as Yu's case.
Peng and Huang set up a studio and hired 6 people, including Dong and Huang, to use the equipment "magic stone" in "Demon Domain" to forge and upgrade whether it was successful to gamble. After auditing, the studio received a total of more than 14 million yuan of player betting funds, and Peng, Huang and others earned a total of more than 970,000 yuan in handling fees.
The Intermediate People's Court of Dongguan City, Guangdong Province, made a final judgment and sentenced defendants Peng and Huang to 1 year and 9 months imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 yuan for the crime of gambling; Defendants Dong and Huang were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from 1 to 6 months and fined 5,000 to 3,000 yuan.
After arriving at the case, Yu also said that he saw that other guilds were also doing this form of live broadcast, and he felt that the money was quick and he made a lot of money, so he simply joined it.
In addition, the Hefei police once smashed a gambling gang involving 128 million yuan, members of the "Demon Domain" in a "teleportation" tool to randomly teleport on the map, according to the last digit of the arrival location coordinates for gambling, gamblers will bet before each transmission. Some players indulged in it and lost 300,000 yuan in house purchases.
According to media reports, because the "magic stone" can be realized through certain channels, players have been reporting the game for suspected gambling for many years. However, the development company of "Demon Domain" denied this, claiming that there is no such operation as a magic stone merchant, and does not support any offline forms of trading for the sake of property security.
("Skyware" is a pseudonym)
Column Editor-in-Chief: Wang Haiyan Title Image Source: Picture Worm Picture Editor: Xu Jiamin
Source: Author: Jiefang Daily Wang Xianle Correspondent Sun Xiaoguang